Governor-General Vincent Massey (right) examines the mace
he will present to the Northwest Territories Council when it meets
at Ottawa in January. With him is James A. Houston, Arctic

Division, Department of Northern Affairs. _ ve

‘Eskimos make NWT mace

E new mace made for the
Northwest Territories Coun-
cil (see Pacific Tribune, Novem-

‘ber 25) is the work of eight
Eskimo craftsmen from Cape
Dorset on Baffin Island, among
them two outstanding carvers,
Oshaweetuk and Pitsulak.
Shaft of the mace, which is
five feet long and weight 35
pounds, is made from a nar-
whal tusk and the oak at the
base is taken from the wreck

of HMS Fury, wrecked on Som-

erset Island in 1825 while search
ing for the Northwest Passage.

Crown at the top is fashion-
ed from beaten native copper
and part of an old copper kettle
left behind by Lapp raindeer
herders. The orb is of whale-
bone and the muskox horns
extending from the’shaft of the
mace are inset with gold from
Yellowknife mines.

BOOKS

*

Thompson shows philosophy

as product of class struggle

PHILOSOPHER, said some-

one, is a blind man in a
dark room looking for a black
cat that isn’t there.

And that is not a bad des-
cription of the professional
philosophers who hold chairs in
our universities.

But that is not how philogo-
phy began. George Thompson in
his The First Philosophers, com-~-
panion volume to his Studies;in
Ancient Greek Society tells how
it did begin. (Both are obtain-
able here at the People’s Co-

operative Bookstore, 337 West

Pender, The First Philosophers
at $5, Studies in Ancient Greek
Society at $8.50.)

Criticism of the outlook of the
ruling class arose independently
in two centres of the ancient
world. 2

In Palestine, situated between
the big empires of Egypt and
Mesopotamia, the Hebrew  pro-

phets, spokesmen of the exploit-

ed peasantry, met the official
myth. with counter-myth of a
people’s god, J ahvek, who would
avenge them and bring in the
Golden Age. Seats
In the Greek cities of the
Aegean, where for many centur-
ies there was no big empire, the
working of: iron and the alpha-
bet led to a development ‘of
craftsmanship, and a widespread
literacy and so to commercial
expansion, the invention of coin-
ed-money and the free criticism
of institutions and ideas which
had survived from olden times.
In the 6th century B.C., the
first philosophers, mainly men
who either belonged to or had
thrown in their lot with the ris-
ing merchant class, began study-
ing nature without regard to the
official myths of their cities.
Parallel with the materialism
of these men there arose among
the exploited classes of this area
a new religion, Orphism, which

gave up this world as a bad job
and comforted its votaries with
hopes of another life in which
they would be rewarded and

_theiz, tormentors tormented.

Among the middle class, He-
tween the exploiters and the ex-
ploited, the new science and new
mysticism *were fused in the
Pythagorean philosophy, which
in the Greek colonies in South
Italy even formed a_ political
party for a time.

“All this time the Greek cities

were ithe arena of hot class |

struggles between their old no-

* bilities on the one hand and the

merchants and peasants on the
other. These struggles were re-
flected in Greek philosophy.
The ousting of the nobles by
moneymaking merchants led

‘Heraclitus of Ephesus in the 5th

century B.C. to see struggle as

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the key to everything, and made
him in his way a precursor of
dialectical materialism.

The next great philosopher,
Paramenides of Elea, in South
Italy, did what only a person
utterly divorced from produc-

tive work can do; he denied.

that the changing world was
real and asserted that reality
was one, changeless, timeless
and to be known only by pure
reason. :

He’ set, in short, the “black
cat” fashion in philosophy. From
then on the lists were set. Ma-
terialism was confronted by
idealism. ;

By remembering the class
struggle, which most historians
of philosophy forget, Georg?
Thompson makes the story both
exciting and convincing.

A. ROBERTSON

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*
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SAA NEED NAPA SAEA SAND AER STB NASA SAEAIA
PACIFIC TRIBUNE — DECEMBER 9, 1955 —_